Report: transportation tax could ease congestion

Motorists negotiate the intersection of Bluff Street and Sunset Boulevard in St. George on Monday, Aug. 31, 2015. State traffic managers are planning to overhaul the intersection as part of a larger effort to improve a one-mile stretch of the Bluff Street corridor.(Photo: David DeMille/The Spectrum & Daily News)Buy Photo

They’re scheduled to make their decision during their regular 4 p.m. meeting Tuesday, and if the plan moves forward it would be up to voters to decide whether they think the costs would be worth it.

Individual cities and towns are performing their own analyses of the tax and equating the new money to specific projects, but the overall picture from a countywide perspective suggests revenues from the tax — or at least some other funding equivalent — would reduce traffic delays substantially, according to the MPO report.

Using computer modeling software — the MPO favors a well-known program called Cube, the same program used across the state — planners calculated the number of hours each year caused by traffic impediments associated with congestion — time spent waiting in line at traffic lights, time spent waiting to turn, time spent moving more slowly behind a line of traffic and so on.

They concluded there are about 2,200 hours of traffic delays currently slowing down Washington County drivers each year.

But because of a number of factors, especially projected population growth and some natural traffic barriers created by the collection of hills, mesas, rivers and other obstacles of the local geography, the figure is expected to grow quickly if new road projects don’t come online.

Without any new road facilities, the county is projected to see 45,000 hours of delay by 2040, according to the model. Almost every major thoroughfare in the area would fail, meaning there would be more cars trying to use them than they can accommodate.

If projects were built out according to the long-range plan using existing revenue, that delay would be cut about in half, down to 19,000 hours, but many local roads would still fail, including Dixie Drive, Snow Canyon Parkway, Red Cliffs Drive, Mall Drive, River Road, 3000 East, Brigham Road and a long list of others.

The potential revenues that could come from the new sales tax proposal could cut those delays in half again, to 10,000 hours, according to the models, and on a per-capita basis traffic delays would not be significantly more common than they are today, Lee said.

“We can design a system that runs just great. The hang-up is dollars,” he said. “We’re fiscally constrained.”

The local option sales tax, known throughout much of the state as Proposition 1 after it was made available to counties by the Utah Legislature, would add a quarter-cent tax to every $1 spent on non-food goods and require the money be spent on transportation.

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(Photo: David DeMille/The Spectrum & Daily News)

It is estimated the tax would cost the typical Utah citizen about $40 per year.

If enacted, it is projected to put about $1.9 million of new monies into the transportation budgets of the county, with another $2.3 million going to cities and towns based on a calculation that counts both population and point-of-sale.

St. George, the area’s largest city, could see about $1.4 million, with another $1.6 million going toward its SunTran transit service.